Hydra - Multibox Leveling Helper

Hydra is a multibox leveling helper that aims to minimize the number of times you need to actively control secondary characters.

Scroll down for a full list of features. Options are accessible by typing “/hydra” or by browsing to the Hydra panel in the Interface Options window. Several common commands can also be keybound in the standard Key Bindings window.

Please note that Hydra is not a replacement for key cloning software — addons can’t cast spells, target units, or perform many other actions, so you will still need some way to send your key strokes and mouse clicks to your secondary characters’ instances of WoW.

Hydra operates on the basis of “trust”. You tell it which characters you trust, whether they're your multibox characters or just your questing buddies, and features are enabled or disabled depending on whether you’re in a party with trusted characters or not. For example, whispers are only forwarded to party chat if everyone in the party is on your trusted list.

You can add or remove names to your trusted list in the options panel. There's also an option to add everyone in your current party to your trusted list, for quick setup for multiboxing groups.

Automation

Accepts summons and resurrections.

Declines duels, guilds, and arena teams.

Repairs equipment and sells junk to vendors.

Chat

Forwards whispers to secondary characters to party chat.

Forwards responses in party chat back to the sender as a whisper from the secondary character.

Follow

Notifies you when a party member starts or stops following you.

Type “/followme” or “/fme” to command all party members to follow you.

Type “/corpse accept” to make all other party members who are ghosts accept their corpse.

Type “/corpse release” to make all other party members who are dead release their spirit.

Mount

Causes other characters in the party (and in range) to mount when you mount.

Party

Accepts party invitations from trusted characters.

Request a party invitation by typing “/inviteme name”, where “name” is the target. If no target is specified, your current target unit will be used.

Request a promotion to party leader by typing “/promoteme”.

Quest

Accepts quests that another trusted party member already accepted, or all quests

Turns in completed quests (you still need to choose a reward if there’s a choice)

Abandons quests abandoned by trusted party members

Taxi

Autoselects the last taxi node selected by anyone in the party in the last 60 seconds.

Type “/cleartaxi” to manually clear the selection for the current character.

Hold the Shift key when interacting with the flight master to bypass this module’s functionality.

Limitations & Caveats

Chat module limitations:

Whispers containing a high number of “spam words” (words that commonly appear in goldselling, powerleveling, phishing, or other spam) are forwarded as “POSSIBLE SPAM” instead of the actual text, to avoid having your account appear to send spam. If you want to see the actual message, check the receiving character’s chat log.

Whisper forwarding is disabled in non-trusted parties, and there is currently no notification if someone whispers a secondary character in this situation.

Primary character detection:

Hydra currently offers two methods for detecting the primary character. By default, it assumes that the primary character is the party leader. You can use the options panel to switch to checking for applicaton focus instead, but this method will not work if you are using multiple physical machines, and may not work if you are running multiple clients in windowed mode.

Advanced Chat Usage

If whispers from multiple senders are forwarded to party chat, your responses in party chat are assumed to be directed toward the sender of the most recently forwarded whisper. You can respond to a previously forwarded whisper by prefacing your message in party chat with “@name”, where “name” is the name of your character that forwarded the whisper.

If whispers from multiple senders are forwarded by the same character, you can respond to a previous message by whispering that character with “@name message”, where “name” is the name of the person you want “message” to be whispered to. You can also use this feature to have your secondary characters send whispers to people who haven’t already whispered you.

Version 6.0.2.206

Updated for WoW 6.0

Taxi sharing now works immediately for secondary characters who already have the taxi map open

Improved dismount detection for noobs who click off auras to dismount

Fixed junk selling profit report for stacked items

Added alchemy and engineering specialization quests to the ignore list

Version 5.4.8.187

Fixed textures overlapping on the "remove name" dropdown when there are no names to remove

I posted a ticket on Github.
When I have PhanxChat and/or PhanxBuffs enabled, Hydra won't save it's automation settings: it ignores what I change in interface options. Also, I cannot select "use guild funds".

If there are specific features you're missing feel free to post tickets. I'm not opposed to adding things that seem useful, though I can't guarantee how quickly anything will get done.

Also, someone posted a possible solution to your taxi problem on GitHub (https://github.com/Phanx/Hydra/issues/4) ... the only way it can actually solve the problem is if the game client is doing something it should absolutely not be doing, but it is Blizzard we're talking about, so I wouldn't put it past them. Feel free to try it out and let me know if it also solves it for you.

I posted that change to Taxi. I've been using it since November and it has corrected the problem.

The problem is caused when one of the team members does NOT have a flight master open when the destination is selected. I posted some test results on Github.

I really appreciate the work you have done with Hydra. I'll think of stuff that Jama does that Hydra or no other addon does and post to Github.

If there are specific features you're missing feel free to post tickets. I'm not opposed to adding things that seem useful, though I can't guarantee how quickly anything will get done.

Also, someone posted a possible solution to your taxi problem on GitHub (https://github.com/Phanx/Hydra/issues/4) ... the only way it can actually solve the problem is if the game client is doing something it should absolutely not be doing, but it is Blizzard we're talking about, so I wouldn't put it past them. Feel free to try it out and let me know if it also solves it for you.

The author of Jamba has posted that he will no longer be maintaining that addon.
Hydra may see more usage.
I use both for different parts, but have been trying to switch 100% over to Hydra since it is easier to configure.

Oops, forgot to update the links in the description. I've closed the ticket trackers on WoWI and Curse to consolidate everything on the much nicer ticket tracker on GitHub (https://github.com/Phanx/Hydra/issues). Aside from the one-time pain of registering on another site, it's better for everyone; you'll actually get an email when I reply to the ticket, and be able to reply directly to the email without even having to go to the site, and I'll only have to look in one place to see what needs to be worked on when I have time. I did copy all the open tickets over beforehand.

However, my time and interest have both been very limited since the expansion launch (I haven't even made it to 100 yet), and I've been prioritizing issues that are affecting me personally in the little time I do play, or that can be addressed without extensive in-game testing (I have a lot of down time at work where I can read forums and work on code, but no WoW there) and unfortunately none of the two issues you've reported for Hydra fall into either of those categories, so I haven't really made any progress on them.

Taxi sharing now works immediately for secondary characters who already have the taxi map open

Improved dismount detection for noobs who click off auras to dismount

Fixed junk selling profit report for stacked items

Added alchemy and engineering specialization quests to the ignore list

Still need to investigate the reported issue with promoting in cross-realm groups. Also, auto-selection of the most valuable quest reward is temporarily disabled because I didn't have time to fix it right now, but I wanted to get an update out anyway.

Please click the "Feature Request" button on the download page and submit a ticket. Otherwise there's an extremely high probability I will forget about your request since I don't have time to implement it right this moment.

Taxi won't work if team already has the flight master window open.
Example: I ride up to a flight master, open window, have all my other 4 toons interact with target so they all open the flight window, first toon selects flight. Other toons won''t auto go to same destination unless I close the flight window and reopen it.

If any of the team are mounted when they open the flight master window, they will dismount but will not take the flight.

I'm trying to replace the Jamba addon with Hydra. Jamba does handle the flight master situations I listed above.

Would be nice if Hydra would also.

PS: I really like this addon. It is very simple to setup and get to work.

1. Dark green text on a dark gray background is completely unreadable. Please don't do that in the future.

2. If you don't want Hydra to manage your group settings while in a trusted group, just disable the Group module. I don't plan to add toggles for the individual group settings, since I can't really think of any reason you'd want anything other than FFA looting while multiboxing.

Thanks for the quick response.
I use Hydra for playing with my child and/or girlfriend, it helps to preserve doing some things twice (like "oh i forgot to accept that quest" : ) and the FFA looting wasn't the right thing for us in that case ("did you loot that thing for the quest? nope, my bags were full...").
But now i disable the group module and im fine. thank you again for that nice Add-on.

1. Dark green text on a dark gray background is completely unreadable. Please don't do that in the future.

2. If you don't want Hydra to manage your group settings while in a trusted group, just disable the Group module. I don't plan to add toggles for the individual group settings, since I can't really think of any reason you'd want anything other than FFA looting while multiboxing.

Fixed textures overlapping on the "remove name" dropdown when there are no names to remove

I haven't had time to look into a fix for alternative methods of dismounting not being shared with other characters, but I had to push out this update to avoid conflicts with my other addons using the same dropdown widget library.

If I use the "/dismount" command, all of my toons dismount.
If I right-click on the mount's name in the buff area (top right next to minimap), they do not all dismount.
While mounted, if I click on the mount's icon which I copied to an action bar, the toon dismounts, but none of the others dismount.